Thursday, January 27, 2011

Ghengis Khan Was A Greenie

Several writers have been commenting on work done by Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, who was lead author of a study into Ghengis Khan's environmental impact. (as if they don't have anything better to study.. and I wonder if this was funded by taxpayer money or stimulus funding in education.. but I digress)

It is posited that by that killing 40 million people, Ghengis Khan could be hailed as having a "positive" effect on global warming. How nice. I wonder if he recycled and filtered his drinking water too.

"When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere....

The Mongol invasion had the most significant impact. According to the study's accounting, re-growth of forests during the Mongol invasion absorbed 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, equaling the amount of carbon global society now produces annually from gasoline."

Hance also talks about the initial study:

In a study published in The Holocene, Pongratz along with Carnegie colleague, Ken Caldeira, and German colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, compiled a model of global land cover beginning in 800 AD. She kept her eye on four historical events closely, which she theorized could have impacted the climate due to the return of forests after depopulation: the Black Death in Europe (the end of the 14th Century), the fall of China's Ming Dynasty (the last half of the 17th Century), the conquest of the Americas (the 16th and 17th Centuries), and the Mongol invasion of the 13th and 14th Century.

"Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan's unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere."

That Ghengis was truly a Godsend.Julia Pongratz the originator of this study of Khan's environmental impact claims:

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,...Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth's landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

Also ... with the Black Death, it looks like all those infected rats in Europe did the world a favor by killing off so many people. Looks like the disease carrying rodents were good for something after all!

"We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil," explains Pongratz. "But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion and the conquest of the Americas, there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon."

I am heartened, and even a bit amused, to know that even staunch liberals are finding this study to be quite distasteful in its praise for ginormous death tolls as being "good for the environment".

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